


clear and crystalline

by renquise



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gratuitous use of transportation mishaps, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Wizards being dramatic at each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:46:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28292592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: Teleportation mishaps are always unpleasant, but this one especially so. It is bitter cold, and Essek can feel the scattered locations of all those he teleported like fading pinpricks of light in his mind. There is only one light that feels closer.
Relationships: Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 9
Kudos: 196





	clear and crystalline

**Author's Note:**

> This plays extremely fast and loose with any mechanics it references, so please don’t look too closely at them, because all of it is entirely in the service of wizards huddling for warmth and having conversations about hubris. \o/
> 
> (As someone who is morbidly fascinated with ill-fated polar expeditions and their through-line of hubris and fallibility, I cannot describe how thrilled I am to have Essek show up in Eiselcross.)

The side of his face is burning. 

High walls of white all around him. Too bright, even in the dark. He closes his eyes again.

He’s too warm. He rolls onto his side, wrestling out of his wide coat sleeves. His head aches. 

“Essek? Why did you remove your coat? Verdammt, you are ice-cold—”

He’s upright, and his arms are being bent. The weight of his coat settles on him again.

“Ach, how long were you lying there, you must wake—”

He aches all over, as though he’s been crushed in the maw of a beast. Teleportation mishaps are always unpleasant, but this one especially so. He can feel the scattered locations of all those he teleported like fading pinpricks of light in his mind. There is only one light that feels closer.

He jerks up.

“There you are.”

Caleb. 

His mouth forms around the name, but it feels unwieldy, thick in his mouth.

He tries to stand, and his body slackens without his permission. He barely catches himself on Caleb’s arms. His legs tremble under him, pitifully unable to hold his weight. His magic is scraped empty, leaving him bereft even of the basic casting for floating. He snarls, frustration thick in his veins. 

The air around them is dry and cold, burning in Essek’s lungs.

Caleb’s grasp is steady and warm, and he brings them both to ground on the hard-packed snow as Essek’s legs fold under him.

“Come. We have to stay warm, if we’re to live to have Beauregard rub this in both our faces.” Caleb’s voice is tired. “I think I have just enough to make us more comfortable for the night, so we can recover enough to rejoin the others tomorrow.”

Caleb presses his fingers to the cold skin of Essek’s neck and nods after a moment, apparently satisfied that Essek isn’t going to keel over at the next stiff breeze. He busies himself with laying out ritual components around Essek. 

He is very tired. He closes his eyes for a moment. 

He blinks, and a shimmering dome closes over them. Above, the stars are still visible, cold and clear. The temperature is instantly more comfortable, but the packed snow beneath them still seeps cold into Essek’s bones.

Caleb shakes his hands out, as if his joints are stiff. He looks drawn. “That’s all I have until I get some rest.”

Caleb shrugs out of his long overcoat, then lays it on the ground, beckoning him over. “If it is acceptable to you, I think we might do best to stay close to not lose heat. There is no use in standing on ceremony in this frozen wasteland.”

True. He shuffles onto Caleb’s coat. It takes him an embarrassing amount of time to undo his cloak’s clasps, his fingers slipping on their catches. A muffled part of him wonders what would become of a mage with no fingers to work somatic components. He feels the cold at once before Caleb draws his cloak over them both. Caleb sits pressed up against his side. He is almost scalding. Essek resists the urge to shrink away from his heat.

A violent quaking overtakes his body. He can’t seem to stop it.

Caleb straightens suddenly, looking into the far distance, alert. A moment, two, and he sags back.

“Jester,” Caleb sighs in relief. “Yes, Essek is with me. I think we are substantially further. We’ll rejoin you in the morning once I can polymorph, yes.”

“Jester?” Essek asks, a shudder coursing through him. His mouth is clumsy around her name.

“Ah. Yes. She is well, and she has found everyone else. She will gather everyone to the outpost. I told her not to pick us up, as I think we got shunted substantially further by the teleportation mishap, and I did not want them to be stranded without shelter in the ice, especially drained as they are.”

Jester’s Sending to Essek had said that they were pinned down, almost out of spells, and fading fast. Caleb looks mostly unwounded, but he has the scraped-raw, drawn look of one with little or no magic left to give. 

Essek hadn’t seen who they were fighting to make them so desperate for aid. He had arrived, gasping from the effort of wrenching teleportation out of this uncanny waste, cast a gravity well, and then wasted no time in yanking them all out of there.

“So. Teleportation should not be possible here, from what I heard,” Caleb says carefully.

Essek chafes his hands against each other. They are prickling uncomfortably as feeling slowly returns to them. “I, ah. Brute-forced it a little. It was not an elegant solution, but I weighed my options, and they were not many. The risks were acceptable.”

“How wounded are you?” Caleb asks. The question is clinical: how long can you survive. 

The full-body ache is manageable, although it leaves him weak and short of breath. But he feels—unstable. As if his being might lose physical coherence, crush in on itself and fly apart all at once. 

“I’ll live.”

“That is not an answer, but I will assume that these teleportation attempts went to shit and you bore the brunt of them, yes?”

“Well. I repeated the attempt three times before I got to you.”

When he received Jester’s whispered sending, he first calculated what the worst-case scenario might be, supplied himself with potions so that the teleportation blowback wouldn’t leave him dead in the ice without reaching the Nein, and then started casting. He doesn’t have any potions left.

Caleb slants a glance at him. “You could have left us.”

Essek shrugs, casting his glance aside from Caleb. It seems useless to try and express that it was not an option. 

Caleb’s face goes soft—just for a moment, before his expression recedes to neutral practicality. It’s pathetic, perhaps, that that glancing softness makes this all worth it.

Caleb catches his hand and frowns.

“You are still very cold.”

“You too.” The empty pools of their magic left them both colder, no doubt.

"Yes, but you are still shaking. The combined effects of the force damage you took and your drained magic, I think. And lying unconscious in some ice. That too."

Essek doesn't dare ask why Caleb is familiar with the combined effects of magic loss and bodily harm. It isn't his place.

Caleb gently chafes his hand, then reaches for his thick mittens to draw them onto Essek's hands.

"You do not have to do this," Essek says. His mind still feels slow. He doesn’t pull his hands back from Caleb’s touch.

“I don’t,” Caleb agrees. “But I am grateful for your help, and I would like for you to keep your fingers.”

He pulls a rod of heating out, fitting his hands around it for a moment, then presses his palms to the sides of Essek’s neck. Essek almost flinches away from the warmth. 

“We must warm you back up slowly. I wish I had something hot to offer you to drink, but I am bereft.”

The care chafes at Essek, makes him uneasy. He doesn’t know if it’s the helplessness, the vulnerability of accepting this aid, or something else altogether. His body seems to quake even harder, making the shape of words difficult.

“Why did you all trust that I would come to help you? I have given you little reason to rely on me.” 

Why would you all put yourself in such danger, he wants to say, why put yourself in a situation in which I was your only lifeline. He doesn’t want to think of a world where the Nein do not exist somewhere, creating gleeful chaos and shaking up the places they pass through.

“You have said that your loyalty lies with the Nein, with us, yes? It seemed worth a try.” Caleb looks at him clinically, his fingers over Essek’s pulse. He tilts Essek’s head to either side, then touches his fingertips to the tip of Essek’s ears, testing their warmth.

“Still. I’m not sure you should put that much faith in me. My hands are tied by my office, too.”

“Well, you've bent the strictures of your station before, yes? I do not trust you with those Eorean ruins, but that is different. I wouldn’t trust myself to ignore their potential, either,” Caleb says, matter-of-fact.

“And yet you entrusted me with yourself, your well-being. You are doing so even now,” Essek points out with relish, feeling as though he’s won some ground, before cold rushes down his spine. 

Too much. Too much, too bare, too close to the bone without meaning to be so.

“I am.” Caleb says it with such simplicity. "Perhaps it's a gamble. But I am tired, and you are very wounded, and it would be extremely foolish of you to condemn us both to a freezing death. And I am tired of keeping my guard up around you.”

Essek feels his throat close, his eyes prickling. The very act of professing to trust him could be manipulation, too: another move in their mutual game. Essek wouldn't blame Caleb for it. He wants to fight it, wants to bite out that Caleb thinks awfully highly of himself, if he thinks himself more intriguing, more precious to Essek than the ruins of a floating civilization of mages and all their forbidden knowledge. 

He doesn’t. He knows the answer to that unasked question.

“Besides, I think you are the one trusting me with your well-being right now,” Caleb says with a lopsided smile. “A good breeze would knock you over.”

Essek finds himself shaking again. Caleb warms his hands again and presses them to his neck, gorgeous warmth seeping into him.

Avoiding his gaze, Essek looks up at the stars, clear and cold. A lick of brilliant green cuts across the sky, shimmering.

“Oh. Look at that,” Caleb says. His voice is full with wonder. 

The flames shimmer and dance in the hanging air, a cold wildfire that reflects in Caleb’s clear eyes. Essek thinks of the sea ice in the sunshine of day, the way it shone clear and blue where the sun glanced through, and turned to sea-dark depths further in. 

“Have you seen them before?” 

“No. I have only heard of them.”

“You sometimes can see them on the outskirts of Rohsona, where there are less lights. We are told that it is a manifestation of the Luxon’s light, a tear in the darkness.”

“I assume you don’t believe that.”

“No. They often coincide with a shift in leylines, so I think their occurrence might be tied to some celestial event that affects both.”

Caleb hums, thoughtful. "There are instruments at the station, yes? It would be interesting to see the conditions in which they occur. Our expedition, ah, might have some things as well."

They are in the middle of barren ice, and yet, this feels like throwing ideas to each other in a laboratory, like the shivering thrill and dread of knowing that this, this was what he was seeking all along when he betrayed his country and plunged a continent into bloody conflict, not knowing what it was he truly wanted.

Someone to talk to under shifting light and dark.

“I am sorry,” Essek says into the dark, sudden and flat. “This could have been simpler.” 

Easier, more trusting, warmer, if he wasn't the person he is.

“This expedition? This expedition was never going to be simple, even before we got a Cerberus Assembly member very murdered and ran into the walking body of an old friend,” Caleb says, dry. 

The humour is clearly an out, if Essek wants to take it. It’s kind. Essek doesn’t want this kindness.

“No. I mean—” he gestures out from himself. His arms ache. “I mean, this. The two of us.”

It feels strange to acknowledge something that’s only ever been unsaid. Like saying out loud might shatter this fragile in-between, this state of being and not-being, this simultaneous existence of many states that exists only if it isn’t observed, isn’t named.

Caleb lets out a gusting breath. “We come from two nations barely at peace. It would never have been simple, yes?” 

Caleb closes his eyes, blue shuttering from view. 

“You would be someone entirely different, if you hadn’t even been tempted to give the beacons for knowledge,” Caleb says suddenly. 

“Someone better?” Essek says. He tries not to sound bitter.

“Perhaps. Someone less curious, less driven, too.” He goes silent again. “I don’t know that I would have been as compelled by that person.” He shifts, his shoulder pressed against Essek’s. “I could have been someone very different, too.”

Caleb looks at the light tearing through the darkened sky. He turns his gaze to Essek. 

“I want to see this city,” Caleb says. “I want to know what made this civilization of god-hunters fall from the sky.” 

A shock of heat runs down Essek’s spine. The back of his neck tightens and prickles, sparks in his skin. He finds his breath short.

Caleb closes his eyes and sighs. “I want for both of us to be better, so I can stop mistrusting myself when I want these things.”

 _When I want you_ is unspoken in the air between them. 

“Ah,” Essek says. He feels well and truly lost for words. “That is what your family is for, yes? To hold you to account.”

“To hold us to account,” Caleb says. "Yes. It's a good thing we have them."

He lets out a gusting sigh.

“Come, friend. We have to rest, if we are to get any of our energy back.”

Caleb takes hold of one of Essek's hands and turns onto his side, effectively gathering Essek to curl against his back. Essek freezes, too conscious of the vulnerable nape of Caleb's neck, the curling hair escaping from the braided sides of his tail. 

This promises to be the roughest trance that he's ever experienced, and yet he feels warm, the shivers under his skin finally subsiding. He wants Caleb's warmth curled around his back, too, his breath at the nape of his neck.

Essek lies awake for a long while yet. The dancing lights take a long time to recede into the dark.


End file.
